Before your change to Linux

This includes the Linux greybeards too.
I never switched to Windows, but switched directly from AmigaOS to Linux, in 1994.
- I loved my A500 and A1200/030 and occasionally fire up fs-uae for the nostalgia.

Windows 10

Greybeard here.
I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.
Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you'd find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.
The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.
At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?
Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because 'apt-get dis-upgrade', of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.
I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.
Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because "Linux has no future", "Unix is dying". I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.
- They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.
  I remember thinking... Naaah, this is a gimmick, gimme 20 or so. Still have a few CDs laying around.
  the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do
  Working with linux?
  
  Yes.
  For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you'd be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don't know.
  In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small Lego^TM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I've worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud... Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.
- I settled with Debian because 'apt-get dis-upgrade', of course.
  A friend showed me an early version of Debian, probably sometime around 1996, and it was immediately obvious that this was the way. It's been Debian for me ever since.

Was using Tiny 10/modified Windows 10,but switched to Linux Mint beacuse of low system requirements and low resource usage,as I have 15 year old PC

Windows was but a brief interlude between AmigaOS and Linux.

Windows 98 second edition By then i was bored with windows and a friend told me about Linux and i haven't looked back.
- Windows 98SE for me too. I wanted to escape XP hell, so I stayed on 98SE until 2005 when I switched to linux.
  
  i want to also help represent the 98 crowd here.
  technically it was windows me in my situation; but it might as well have been called windows 98 third edition.
- Serious question how do you get bored of Windows during its heyday?
  My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu 4.10 and it seemed super cool and all but I could've never switched fully during those days. And if we're honest most legit Linux users up until not too long ago were forced to have a dual boot setup because so many things just hadn't been universalized yet.
  So just to illustrate where I'm coming from asking that question, my first personal computer (as opposed to family PC) ran XP and that was a pretty exciting time when it comes to market dominance and all the advantages that came with being a user of the biggest platform. Looking back I just don't see how I could've ever made that switch in the noughties let alone the 90s. The adoption just wasn't there yet.

Windows XP. I worked MSN tech support the year Blaster hit. I remember droning through the same repair steps every 15 minutes with caller after caller in a neverending stream that lasted for weeks.
After a couple of weeks of this, my coworkers and I had a weekend off together and we planned to party it up and blow off some steam with a LAN Party with Freelancer and beers. I had my comp all prepped and ready, it was freshly reinstalled and the game had been tested and benchmarked.
I came home from a long shift to find the one of the new Blaster variants, which used a new vulnerability that had not been patched until I had been at work that day. It had triggered so many reboots while I was at work it triggered NTFS corruption somehow. I had to reinstall.. And I had done nothing to deserve that.
That virus fucking broke me. I went to work after that weekend and went to the Linux guru in Tier 3, and said "Teach me".
I have never looked back with the exception of having to install it for a specific reason, and I'm usually appalled at the state of it. I just had to install Win 11 for a Google Cloud certification exam (DaFuq!?!?!) and with all the issues I encountered it took about 6 hours to get it ready for the exam. Win11 doesn't come with network drivers anymore? Two NICs and a WiFi card in my machine, and none of them had drivers in the install. Nice to see we've gone full cycle back to Windows ME, except the OEM bloatware is a core part of the OS.
When my wife finally dropped Windows a month ago between the ads and recall, it marked the death of daily users of Windows in our house. I'm raising my kid on Linux.

Windows 10. It was during the pandemic (late 2020), and I saw a Mutahar video of his desktop (at the time, I did not know of KDE Plasma, just gnome, unity and cinnamon) and I was like "Whoa, his desktop looks so much better than when I remember using linux. I should install Arch because that is what he used to get that desktop."
I have used linux before on Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu, so installing arch using a youtube tutorial was not going to be that hard. Although it did take 2 days (Mostly procrastination and fear).
I will say this: I have a 98 computer and an XP computer for me to use, and I found those UIs better than in Windows 10. When I switched to linux with KDE Plasma, the oldschool UIs could not compete. Plasma is just THAT good.
I was also madly in love, with me calling KDE Plasma like being in a dream, and using Windows 10 is like waking up to the cold old stale office life.
What great timing too, with Proton kicking off right at the same time too, eventually me removing the need to dual boot.
TL;DR: I switched because I found out about KDE Plasma, and linux gaming was becoming infinitly better.
- I had dabbled with Ubuntu desktop in the past, but it was the Steam Deck with KDE that really sold me on Linux for the desktop.
  I do not like GNOME. KDE is great, though.

Windows 2000

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?
Windows 10. But I knew that I won't have issues adjusting to Linux because I used WSL everyday and I had gallium os sideloaded on my chromebook.
So what's your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
A series of unfortunate events in the span of a month or two along with long persisting issues that made me crack.
I had 2 machines then, a hp laptop and a PC. I used my laptop for school and financial stuff (which was shared with my father) and my PC for programming.
The first issue. The laptop had an update for a long while which it would randomly start and I was not able to put it off. But it always kept failing. It was basically a tradition for me to start my laptop on the tram to school so if there is a pending update, it will try and fail before I need it for schoolwork. I finally cracked, googled the issue and tried to trouble shoot it. The first step was to run a system integrity check. This never finished because when I went back to check up on it, an update had been started. My laptop didn't boot after that because bitlocker couldn't find the keys, even after I would manually input them on the prompt.
The second issue was with my PC. I used WSL everyday. But it would randomly just fail to boot. This was annoying, so I had a script to delete WSL, install it again and install all the packages I needed.
The third issue was also with my PC. I use a us keyboard layout despite not being from the us. This is because the international English keyboard does not input quotation marks when you type them, which makes it difficult to use for programming. But windows switched me to the international keyboard every now and then which made it annoying to code. I tried removing it, but I was not allowed to for whatever reason. What I did was admittedly stupid, but I used regedit and some online help to remove the international keyboard. That didn't work, but all system apps stopped working. I kept using it like this for a bit. Eventually, I got an update. Now I was terrified because I was not able to open settings to postpone this update. I didn't wanna have a repeat of my laptop incident.
So I just finally broke and installed Linux mint. Never looked back, ever. I use arch BTW.
TLDR: laptop got wiped due to a windows update and windows was forcing me to use an international keyboard.

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?
Windows 7
So what's your reasoning for the change to the reliable and funni penguin OS?
After years of heavily customizing and debloating Windows, i got the itch to create a custom ISO. At that point i realized, Linux would be less work.
Had to use 10 in work, there i used Chocolatey and scoop to manage my (t)rusty toolset.

Windows 10. The reason I switched was pretty funny - I had previously bought a cheap SSD and moved my install over to it, and installed Arch on my HDD hoping to experiment with it.
I never really did that, but one day before Christmas my computer booted straight to Arch to my confusion, and after a while I figured out my SSD failed. I ended up installing gnome to have something to use in the meanwhile, since I wasn't gonna be buying a new SSD in the next few days, but then I just decided to stick with Linux. As I learned more about it I realised I was barely missing anything, and I preferred Linux for what I had.

Windows 95, I am ashame to admit I touched it

Vista. Why the change to Linux? See previous answer.

Straight from the Amiga to Slackware in 97. Never been a Windows fan.

Changed only a few weeks ago from Win 11, all the AI crap was creeping in. Using Ubuntu and really enjoying it!

Vista because of license shenanigans. I tried to upgrade from XP and the license wouldn't activate. Support told me my upgrade license wasn't compatible with my XP license, like pro vs home or some crap. I was reinstalling Vista every 30 days for a while, I even got it down to like 15 minutes using a slipstreamed DVD with all the stuff I cared about being installed with the OS. It was manageable but annoying since I paid for the OS and the upgrade but couldn't really use it. Then I took intro to unix and found out linux is free, I'd heard of linux but didn't know it was free. I didn't know what a distro was, I wasted a bunch of time trying to download linux from kernel.org and I couldn't figure out how to get linux to work. Eventually I stumbled upon Ubuntu. Folks, you might not believe this but once upon a time Ubuntu used to be great for newbies. I can still hear the startup music (which was the style at the time) and the african drums. My printer just fucking worked. Firefox and libreoffice just worked, although I quickly learned to turn in deliverables as pdf exports. There were some learning pains but nothing that was any more difficult than random shit that pops up in windows, at least with linux I might get a useful error to point me in the right direction and there was always someone out there smarter than me that posted how to fix it. I haven't looked back.
- @WagnasT @Tekkip20 my experience with switching to Linux was a mix of XP and Vista. My XP machine would get bombed with malware at my University hourly being connected to their wifi, yes my fault sort of. I had absolutely no computer experience and knew nothing about them. I finally gave into Vista. While that stopped the malware bombing, Vista felt like a blob eating my ram. My new friend at uni introduced me to Linux. I'm Autistic, so the whole thing became a special interest.

Windows XP. Jumped onto the Linux bandwagon in 2007. I've used newer versions on other's PC's and don't get why people tolerate that shite.

What was the last version of Windows you used before hopping on over?
Windows95
I got sick of constantly dealing with the BSOD.

The last property OS I used before Linux was OS/2 warp.
- Found the grey beard 😁

Windows 7.
I dabbled in Ubuntu long before.
But when they removed focus stealing prevention, I got extremely frustrated. And as soon as Steam had a beta client for Linux I completely jumped ship.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/applications-stealing-focus-reg-key-no-longer/4ee5be7d-31ef-493b-b092-f6f6139f99cd?

Sadly I can’t help but use windows at work. But in my personal life, that was around 2003. So, XP? Or something like that.

windows me
i think it should be pretty self explanatory why a switch was necessary. lol

XP.
Windows was getting to be too much trouble to 🏴‍☠️, Vista didn't look that great, I couldn't afford to upgrade my hardware to accommodate the bloat, and desktop Linux was a lot more mature and ready to go out of the box.

My "main" OS timeline was:
Apple II/C64
MS-DOS
OS/2
Linux
Technically I used windows 3.1 at times in DOS and OS/2 for some specific piece of software, but it was never what I primarily used and I don't consider Windows 3.1 a proper operating system, it's just a desktop environment.
Not sure exactly when, but I know by 2000 I was fully on board the Linux train.
Started using Linux in the days of floppy boot and root diskettes. Lived through the days of hand-crafted SLIP scripts for dial up internet. The days of needing to pay for working sound drivers. Manually calculating modelines in Xfree86.
I have primarily used Windows at work, probably been 99% windows and 1% Unix/Linux. I have had windows laptops and virtual machines for certain specific use cases but it has never been my main.
- Wow OS/2! Windows 3.1 was awful but Windows 95 being so polished must have made you mad! Villain origin story material. My timeline was a more boring Apple II > Motorola Mac > Power PC Mac > Intel Mac > AMD Ubuntu > M1 Mac. AMA.

Windows 11.
And I still use it at work, and will continue to until I take the time to test out the things I need to make sure I can get them to work correctly.
I don't remember exactly what the tipping point was, but I just got so sick of every little issue, and the copilot crap certainly contributed. Basically got tired of my computer that I paid for being treated like they own it instead of me.
I came very close to switching back around 2009/2010, but Windows 7 and PowerShell got me to stick around and they really seemed to be turning things around for a while. Other than the start screen, I even really liked Windows 8, and 8.1 fixed the worst parts of the start screen.
I've used Linux for servers and just messing around since about 2005.
A few months ago, I rebuilt my PC desktop and got two nvme drives so I could put Linux on one and Windows on another (I know I can put them on the same drive but I knew if I did that deciding how to slice it up would lock me up and risk me never being willing to actually take the plunge)
Installed Linux on the first one. The second one is still unformatted and I'm now planning on using it for additional space for my games. I have no desire to go back. Only just yesterday figured out my graphics driver was not working right/was operating at a very basic level and even with that everything just felt so smooth overall (and got even better after fixing that)

Windows 7 starter

Windows 10.
I wanted customization. Windows provided customization, sure, but like in the worst way possible. Want to change the system colors or what buttons look like? Download this third party theme and apply it with bloated tools that are probably malware in disguise!
Meanwhile on Linux (NixOS), I can just change a few lines in my dotfiles and it works. Sometimes it's inconvenient but I'm not really looking for convenience.

I switched to Linux permanently in 2008. Last OS I used before Linux was Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" (if I recall correctly) which is what came with the Macintosh PowerBook that I had bought roughly in the year 2004. I have never used Microsoft software unless someone was paying me to, but at the time, Windows XP was still all the rage even though Microsoft was trying to get everyone to switch to Windows Vista. (Vista got a lot of well-deserved hate too, sort of similar what we see with Windows 11 right now, actually.)
Anyway, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy, but getting more and more into free software and I kept on using Macports/Homebrew to build Linux stuff I found online, but back in those days a lot of apps I wanted to try did not have good support for the Darwin kernel build of GCC which was pretty old compared to what Linux was using at the time. Occasionally a build would fail, and I would try to port the software on my own, with the idea of maybe submitting a package to Macports. But after a while I realized, "if I want to use Linux software, why not just use Linux?"
So I bought a Netbook (Dell Inspiron Mini 10) with Ubuntu pre-installed. I really loved that little computer, I used it for a good 5 years until I needed a more powerful computer. I still have it, actually. I never went back to Apple until this year when I took a new job where they wanted me to use a MacBook Pro. (Again, not using proprietary software unless I am well paid.)
I can say with confidence that Linux is considerably better than Apple's operating systems. I use Aarch64 Debian 12.5 in a QEMU on that MacBook for most things, only switching over to Mac OS when I really need to.
- You can try asahi linux on the macbook :)
  
  You can try asahi linux on the macbook :)
  I could, but I still need Mac OS for work-related things.

Somewhat new Linux user Main laptop was win11, tested dual-booting on it slightly Fully committed to Linux when my laptop got infected with copilot Now win11 is just there as a tool for specific hardware while Arch Linux as the main

Windows 10, been a year and a half now. I tried ditching windows at least 10 times since 7 came out and I always ended going back because of gaming. Now, my experience is better than it was on windows and every game I go to play works flawlessly. I love it, my computer is mine and my os does what I want it to do.

Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups. Maybe they were the same thing, I don't really remember.
I needed reliable networking, the ability to process large documents (which word couldn't do at the time), and actual multitasking was nice. The system was a bit rough but quite usable. It's not as if Windows was great at the time anyway.

Privately? Win7
Professionally? Win10 currently, looks like it'll have to be Win11 soon. I get no control over my work laptop's OS

Win10. Because I don't liked ads in my tile menu. I switched my PC in 2018, and I also switched my laptop. Though I found a 2015 MacBook Pro on which I hackintoshed MacOS Sonoma through OCLP.

XP..my laptop was an old Acer my mom passed to me and couldn't run vista so I never got it.. Hopped on Ubuntu 09.04

The last Windows I used was Windows 2000 Professional. I bought a new PC, didn't like XP so I switched to Linux full time as I'd been using it more and more anyway. Windows has only gotten worse since then so I've never looked back.

I last used Windows NT 4.0
The internet was just starting to get interesting. Windows had software to browse and do e-mail.
Linux had the stuff to power the whole internet. It was just a whole lot more interesting if you wanted to be more than a consumer of the information super-highway.

Last Windows I ran full-time was XP, ran Win7 for a couple of months before switching Ubuntu 10.04; still used Win XP and Win7 in VM's for years for specific applications.
Win10 is the OS on the work machines, some of it is really nice, but so much feels backward. I don't get why there is still control panel and the settings app. Why is notepad so shit....
I used Win11 recently, it looks quite nice, more consistent than 10 at least. But everything I have read makes me want to stay away.
Ran Ubuntu LTS's finishing with 20.04, have since been running Mint. Snap's made Ubuntu a worse experience for me.

For personal use it was probably Windows 98 SE.
For professional use i'm currently forced to use Windows 10.

Windows 10, about 6 years ago. My main PC shit the bed after a Windows update. I'd been getting more into Linux through work so I figured I'd give it a shot since I was going to have to reimage it either way. Turned out I didn't need windows for anything I wanted to do, so I never went back.

The last Windows version I used was Windows 7 I guess, but merely to play some games. In daily use, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP

I switched two times. WinXP to Mandriva, because of devastating rootkits. Win8.1 to Mint because of performance decrease.

I was still using XP when Ubuntu 5.10 was released, and when I saw my audio worked out of the box, I switched :-) I had been using Mandrake Linux (since 1999) but only for servers and other work related stuff.

WinX. If you are asking what was the catalyst. Their seizmic change from attempting to listen to what customers want. To Cloud and AI first to exploit the customer. Security, and privacy means little to nothing.
Every product team no longer targets what the customers want, none. Everything is to extend AI and rent charging at all cost. A small team infiltrated Microsoft in early 2000’s and warped what success looks like within the company to profit, at any cost.

Windows XP, but I was dual booting windows 95 and red hat 5 (not RHEL 5) in the 90s :)

Well, my beard is the right colour... But none.
I had an Acorn BBC B (running Acorn MOS), then an A3000, A5000, RiscPC (all with RISC OS), then I switched to Linux. I have occasionally used DOS and Windows at work, but never as my main home OS. (I write Linux software for work, but do use a windows laptop to connect to my Dev box)

Like many, it hasn't been a clean "yesterday windows, today linux" thing for me. In 2004, I switched from a Dell Latitude (Windows) to a Mac, but continued to use Windows for work (because it was required), then I switched my most recent Macbook Air to Linux, kept another Mac around running macos, and still use Windows at work (because it's a requirement). I expect I'm going to be Linux-first from now on (so macos's days are numbered around here), but still use Windows at work.
I'm kinda bummed about moving on from macos, but the iOSification is just awful. The OS feels confused and bloated now. I honestly think Apple is due for a pretty serious reset and consolidation of operating systems.

Windows 8.1 was my last version before I made the switch. Windows 8 was horrible. The Metro UI broke all my habits from Windows XP from 7 while also making it harder to tweak my system. By the time 8.1 came out, I'd found enough ways around the main annoyances that its improvements were moot, but many issues remained, such as the bloatware bundled with my PC, and frequent slowness and instability.
As for why I switched, I was attracted by the free software ideal, and trying to get away from Windows, and I had watched and read several things that further convinced me it was superior, but I think the ultimate reason was that I had become hyperfixated on Linux. Thankfully, in this case, autism did not steer me wrong. My level of obsession with Linux has declined, but I still enjoy using my computer much more than I ever did or would on Windows.

Windows 10, still using it but am browsing distros and aim to switch before August. Most likely candidate for me right now is Pop! OS, but given that they have halted development for it to work on their own DE (by the looks of it at least) I may go for Fedora or regular Ubuntu instead.
- I was on 10 and now I'm on Pop. That's the first I've heard of them prioritizing development of a DE.
  I really don't like GNOME, but switching to KDE was literally the first change I made, so I honestly don't know much about it.
  But I don't really care as long as what I do with it works. I don't foresee any killer features upcoming soon or anything. I don't really keep up on news about it or anything though.
  I've had a mostly smooth experience with it so far. But I don't use it for anything crazy. I just pay games and stream YouTube and music.
  Not trying to convince you that "the water's fine, jump in" or anything. But it worked for me. I don't hear a lot about other people picking it up.
  You find a million posts about trying Mint or Ubuntu to get their feet wet, but you don't hear a lot other than those for Linux noobs.
  I bought a tiny PC to hookup to my brother's TV at his house because I go over there on weekends and we always watch a movie followed by a few episodes of whatever TV show we're working on at the time. His laptop cord is having issues and want able to power the laptop while it's on. So rather than deal with that I just bought the tiny PC and I did put Mint on that one.
  Partly to convert another Windows dependant too.
  
  Honestly not planning anything crazy either. And thankfully I do know how to use command line so it doesn't have to be 100% newbie friendly, the reason those two are my top choices is due to the included nvidea drivers. Mint was on my mind too, but from what I read it is better suited for older hardware, whereas I am using a decently modern system (Ryzen 7 3700x & RTX 3060 Ti).
  If I may ask, from a user standpoint, how easy was it to switch from GNOME to KDE on Pop! and what were your problems with GNOME in the first place? Browsing both choices, it looks like both are very customizable, and those plugin options for GNOME look pretty neat. I am aware that GNOME does use more resources, but given my system specs it's not my biggest concern.
- Just coming in to say that I've tried pretty much all the noob Linux suggested distros, and fedora is what I use now. Started with Ubuntu in 2016. Gone through a few other like mint and peppermint. Even endeavor was really good but not 100% for me. Fedora had been pretty bullet proof.

Windows 10, but before Windows 11 was even leaked I believe.

Windows 7 Ultimate for me. I still kept it as a boot option on my main PC until about a year ago because I thought I still needed it for a couple windows apps and games.
I tried Win8 at one point and hated the changes. I also tried Win10 and one of those "forced bloody updates" bricked my machine so I said 'fuck that' for good.
I've dabbled in Linux for 20 years, and run Ubuntu on my living room HTPC for at least a dozen. My main PC runs EndeavourOS now and even gaming has been pretty great.

Just because I daily drive Linux doesn't mean I don't have windows around.
I have used every version of Windows all the way up to 11.
My first attempt at Linux was in the days of Windows 3.1
My first successful conversion over to daily driver was in the XP era
I went Mac for a couple years around the windows 8 time frame.
I change jobs and went back to windows for a a few around win10.
I went back to daily driving Linux and the windows 11 era, but I still have three win 10 boxes and a win 11 box that I use pretty regularly.

Windows 2000 was my primary desktop at the time, though I continued to use Windows XP, 7 and 10 both at work and home for various reasons. I still think Windows 2000 was peak Microsoft. Classic shell, minimal app spam, solid gaming performance, etc.